One of the major determinants of the fitness of biological systems is their ability to integrate multiple cues from the environment and coordinate their metabolism and regulatory networks accordingly. This task is inherently combinatorial – it takes place in a crowded chemical environment where the correct signal has to be discriminated from a background of similar competing signals. Moreover, the fact that at the heart of the information processing lie chemical reactions imposes inherent constrains and limits.

Our goal is to study, both experimentally and theoretically, the signal processing that links nutrient sensing, uptake, growth rate and understating its system level failure in disease and in aged cells. More broadly, we are interested in information processing in complex systems.